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MovieMail's Review
Grizzly Man is built on an opposition. On the one hand there’s Timothy Treadwell, a sentimental, deluded, paranoiac ex-alcoholic who found a purpose to his life through his self-appointed protection of grizzly bears on a park in Alaska. On the other, there’s the doggedly downbeat Werner Herzog, narrating the story in his inimitable voice and utterly resistant to Treadwell’s romantic anthropomorphising, but with 100 hours of the man’s extraordinary video diaries to edit into a film.
However there’s a third element that provides the magic ingredient to the film, for Treadwell, we’re repeatedly told from people who knew him, ‘crossed the line’, and so joins Herzog’s motley collection of adventurers and holy fools, mountaineers, ski-flyers, actors and outsiders that have fascinated him through four decades of filmmaking. For the courage of Treadwell’s commitment – and this is a man who, armed only with love, survived living among grizzlies for 13 seasons – he earned Herzog’s respect.
Treadwell’s wildlife footage is amazing, from lighter moments of him playing with foxes to a mighty battle between two rival grizzlies. However, it’s when he addresses the camera that we see a man in the raw, living in a kind of perpetual ecstatic fear. For Herzog the filmmaker, Treadwell’s worth is confirmed because he put himself in a position to be on hand when nature filled in his story better than any contrived situations or spoken language could. It’s there with the foreboding of wind-bustled bushes, and it’s there in the drops of rain on the lens, gradually obscuring Treadwell’s figure, in the very last shot of his very last video entry.
Documentaries: 'In the Edges: The Grizzly Man Session'
Film Description
A fascinating, moving documentary, in which Herzog explores another of life's outcasts, in this case wildlife preservationist Timothy Treadwell, who spent thirteen summers living among the grizzly bears of Alaska, before he was mauled and devoured by one. Herzog mixes Treadwell's footage with his own commentary to produce a touching portrait of a complex figure while also exploring larger questions of the uneasy relationship betweeen man and nature.
